Let me add to this. The process of legislation has gotten too big and complicated. Congress is passing fewer, larger bills, that include hundreds of small things that get passed without review or agreement, because there is an overriding interest in getting the big things done. Lobbyists don't need to buy a majority of votes, just find a couple people who may already be aligned them, who are willing to continually try to attach changes to bills.
There is a counter-argument, though I'll leave it's plausibility up to the reader.
There are a lot of deductions a taxpayer can use that the IRS doesn't know about. Charity donations are probably the most common, but also business expenses and medical expenses. Teachers who spend their own money to buy class supplies could and should be able to submit those receipts and get a deduction.
That can't be easily simplified. The IRS could eliminate those deductions which would make a lot of people unhappy, or there could be some kind of complete retail overhaul where a teacher would be able to tag items as 'deductions' at the time of purchase, and the vendor would send all those tags to the IRS.
The IRS could just send out bills assuming no deductions, and teachers could then add supplemental information on business expense, but ( the argument goes ) teachers might not know they can, or they might not feel it's worth their effort, and so the end result is that a lot of taxpayers overpay.
Disclaimer - I have worked on tax software, but I wouldn't shed any tears if the industry went down. I'm relaying opinions I've gotten from coworkers at the time.
> Teachers who spend their own money to buy class supplies could and should be able to submit those receipts and get a deduction.
No, they shouldn’t. The class supplies should be paid for by the government, not the teacher.
Deductions need to be completely removed, and replaced with cash. Government should have to account for whatever it wants to incentivize.
Also, I think few teachers probably get past the standard deduction amounts in order to make sense for them to itemize everything in order to get a deduction for classroom supplies.
I think you are right, my point more that until we have revamped our school systems so that teachers do not have to purchase extra expenses, the tax code remains unfortunately complicated.
A lot of the blame goes ( justifiably ) at private companies and their lobbyists, but even without these vested interests there's a lot of complexity that cannot be easily removed
>A lot of the blame goes ( justifiably ) at private companies and their lobbyists, but even without these vested interests there's a lot of complexity that cannot be easily removed
There's nothing logistically difficult about removing the complexity of deductions/exemptions/credits, it's a few sentences typed into a law voted in by the legislature.
The difficult is all in the politics since costs of various subsidies and incentives granted via deductions/exemptions/credits become transparent and part of the government budget.
I'd be interested to see those few sentences. If they are "no more deductions/exemptions/credits" that is (relatively) simple but would upset a whole lot of taxpayers.
That whole argument of the teachers need a complicated tax code is cancerous. There's an easy way I'm happy to solve it with. If you're a public school teacher, you can skip paying taxes. You already aren't paid well enough, this ones on us.
I think they meant "simple" as in the filing process, not the tax code. Agree tax codes get complicated for good as well as bad reasons. It could clearly be simplified, but only so much.
A turbo-tax like interface that covered say, 80% of the working public perfectly well and was free or really cheap is certainly in the realm of possibility.
That's a cute little example, but it's really not at all convincing. How many hundreds of thousands of people have to pay some tax company to file their taxes just so a few teachers who have more deductions than the standard deduction can pay for the privilege of some software to make it a tiny bit easier?
Then, why wouldn't the IRS be able to offer that same functionality? The whole idea that "the IRS can't know" about this type of deduction feels like a lie to me, but I don't know enough to be sure.
